On January 18, 1949, Edward Hopper delivered a painting to his gallerist depicting three people in a vast, bare space, a loft illuminated only by the light from outside. One of the figures is seated and speaking; the other two (a man and a woman) stand listening. Behind them hang swathes of fabric. Almost immediately, Conference at Night was purchased by Stephen Clark, one of Hopper’s foremost collectors. Just a month later, however, Clark returned the painting to the gallery because his wife was convinced the work too closely resembled “a communist cell meeting.”

This incident illustrates just how deeply Cold War paranoia had penetrated the milieu of the American bourgeoisie. It was 1949 – the year of the Soviet atomic bomb test in August and Mao Zedong’s victory in China in October. It was the year of President Harry Truman’s loyalty decrees for federal employees and the year the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled 11 left-wing unions. In the summer of 1948, Alger Hiss and the leadership of the Communist Party of the United States – which, incidentally, never had more than a few thousand members – had been arrested. In the fall of 1949, Judith Coplon, a Department of Justice official, was put on trial for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Red Scare was already pervasive even before Senator Joe McCarthy delivered his famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, effectively kicking off the persecution of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The very term “McCarthyism,” coined by cartoonist Herbert Block in March 1950, is misleading. McCarthyism was not merely the obsession of a single Republican senator. It was a vast and complex movement comprising ambitious politicians like Richard Nixon, the American Legion, the Catholic Church, anti-communist labor leaders, big business and conservative journalists. At the dead center of it all, of course, was J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI, an agency capable of operating in every corner of American life.

For example, during his 1950 Senate campaign, California Congressman Richard Nixon famously accused his Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, of being “pink right down to her underwear” – meaning she was a communist and a Soviet sympathizer. The phrase was originally coined by Manchester Boddy, the owner of the Los Angeles Daily News, and was adopted verbatim by Nixon. His campaign even printed 500,000 copies of the infamous “Pink Sheet” on pink paper, comparing Douglas’s congressional voting record to that of New York socialist Vito Marcantonio. Nixon won the race by a landslide.

As Richard M. Fried of the University of Illinois wrote years ago, anti-communism “drew its persistence from a cluster of values deeply rooted in and shared by much of American society” – a set of beliefs inherently “favorable to private property and hostile to collectivism.” Thus, during the first half of the 1950s, McCarthy was the leading spokesperson for anti-communist forces, but he was neither their creator nor their leader.

The persecution of communists and American radicals in the postwar era was not solely – and often not even primarily – a government operation. It was a collective endeavor that utilized the legal and informational framework provided by the federal government but was largely carried forward and enforced by private actors.

The most famous example is the film industry, where a leading role was played by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), founded in 1944 by figures like Walt Disney, John Wayne and Ronald Reagan. Initially created to crush unionization efforts inside the major Hollywood studios, the MPA ultimately drove the famous 1947 Waldorf Statement. In it, studio executives pledged they would not “knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States.” This was a private corporate agreement, not a law.

A particularly relevant aspect of this persecution of radicals and progressives under the guise of anti-communism involved the universities. According to historian Ellen Schrecker, “The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” In 1953, when the House Un-American Activities Committee launched its hearings into higher education, the presidents of 37 institutions – including Columbia University – signed a statement on academic freedom that effectively legitimized the witch hunt. The text declared that invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination “places upon a professor a heavy burden of proof” regarding their fitness to teach and obliges the university “to reexamine his qualifications.” The subsequent dismissals of faculty members did not occur because federal law mandated them. They happened because administrators feared the reputational damage caused by potential congressional hearings and preemptively acted before the government intervened. This is exactly what is happening today under the pretext of holding pro-Palestinian positions.

The United States of 2026 is not the America of the 1950s. Yet the very name of the movement created by Donald Trump – Make America Great Again – reveals the core dream of its base: to recreate the America of 70 years ago. The full emphasis of the slogan lies on the word again. They want to recreate a United States of Cadillacs, residential suburbs, blonde and submissive wives, church services and Sunday barbecues. No Black or Hispanic people, except to clean houses or pick tomatoes. No unionists or subversives, no protests or riots, nothing to disturb the peace of an orderly and predictable world – at least for the middle class. It is the perfect, manufactured, made-for-TV reality of Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show.

This is, of course, an absurd dream, one that will inevitably end in disaster like all the fascist programs of the last century. What we do not know is how long the nightmare will last, or how much suffering it will inflict on the United States and the rest of the world.

Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/stati-uniti-contro-i-rossi-unimpresa-collettiva on 2026-07-12